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ULB 2004 Preview: Ultimate Linux Box Boots

It's about that time of year again. Time to do the
always-controversial, ever-contentious and "what
do you mean you didn't include my favorite hardware,
you fools" project, otherwise known as the
Ultimate Linux Box.

We've been fortunate to have the help of some
quality Linux box builders in the past.
Los Alamos Computers,
Aspen Systems and
Monarch Computer
Systems
all have done Ultimate Linux Boxes.
This year, Tim Lee and Paul
Bibaud from
Pogo Linux showed off a great collection of
systems at the winter LinuxWorld and volunteered to have Pogo put the system together.

Paul Bibaud, Tim Lee, Jesse Keating, Cosmo King, Eric
Logan and Micah Spacek all are participating in the
project at Pogo, with Cosmo doing the hands-on work. He's happy
to report that the box has survived burn-in and currently is running
a batch of benchmarks.

Big Decisions

Although we probably say it every
year, there's never been a better selection
of Linux-compatible hardware on the market.
IBM has launched a major marketing push for Linux
on POWER, and some people are talking up Apple's
PowerPC-based Power Mac G5
as great for Linux,
but the Ultimate Linux Box always has been about a
system that readers can build, so we're going to go where
the commodity hardware is.

We'll keep watching the market for alternate architectures, but this year it's all about
x86-64, the architecture AMD calls AMD64 and Intel
calls something else.

An address-space-starved Linux market devoured
x86-64 products on introduction and has happily
made it one of the key Linux platforms since then.
When AMD hosted an open-bar celebration of AMD64's
1-year anniversary at New York City's fabulous
Rainbow Room on April 22nd, 2004, they invited the
New York Linux Users Group.

Since we started doing Ultimate Linux Boxes,
two have sported Intel processors and two have used AMD.
With its own x86-64 entry, Intel is certainly in the
running for next year.

Four-Way Commodity Motherboards?

Previous Ultimate Linux Boxes have had two processors,
which generally has been the maximum in the market for
parts for roll-your-own machines.
Vendors will sell you a bigger system, but when
you're building it yourself, the choice has been one
processor or two.

This year, we're moving up to a four-way.
What better way to celebrate the 2.6 kernel?

Too late to make it into this year's box, Tyan just introduced the
Thunder
K8QS (S4880), which is
in a new, larger size known as SSI MEB: 13" x 16"
or 330 x 407mm. Cases that fit are rare.
Still, it's the first industry-standard 4-way, 64-bit
motherboard, and we're thinking about putting one
like it into a tower case next year. A big tower
case, that is.

For now, the builder's choice in four-way x86-64 systems
is bare-bones systems, such as the
Newisys
4300.
Newisys "sells its designs through indirect channels", so vendors can buy a bare-bones system and trick
it out. The business model is similar for the
A8440,
a joint effort between AMD and Celestica.

Bare-bones servers aren't quite what we're
looking for in an Ultimate Linux Box--where would we be
without the case and power supply selection debate?
But we drool over four processors, and we're better
off stepping up to a four-processor system a year
early.

More Pixels, Please

Appian's
Rushmore card offers four displays at up to
2048 x 1536 resolution, and Cosmo reports the
system is booting with two Rushmores installed.
That's 25,165,824 pixels, or 32 times the area of a
conventional 1024 x 768 screen.

We won't go into too much detail about what
applications we can run on all those displays, but
we assure you we'll have sufficient RAM on
the system.

Must-Buy Hardware for 2004

In a major setback for those who choose to
build their own entertainment devices, the US
Federal Communications Commission has approved the
so-called "Broadcast Flag" regulation.
That's bad news for Linux boxes, Ultimate and
otherwise. Future HDTV-capable tuner cards will
be required to enforce a to-be-determined copy
restriction regime. This is one product category
that won't get better next year; it'll be worse.
If you live in the US, before the end of 2004,
if you buy no other PC hardware, pick up a pcHDTV card.
Think of it as the digital equivalent of
your dad's humidor of Cuban cigars.

As the Ultimate Linux Box nears completion,
questions remain. What distribution are you going
to load? What sound card? Are you really going to
put all that memory in one system--won't you get
carpal tunnel syndrome flipping the plastic levers at
the ends of the modules? Find out in Linux Journal's
August issue.